Why Andrea Brooks Says Filming New Hallmark Movie Was ‘Crazy and Wild’

With two big Hallmark premieres a week apart and two young children needing her at every turn, Andrea Brooks is juggling a lot these days. The former “Supergirl” actress admitted during a recent interview that her days are “chaotic” as she juggles her acting work with her most important role as a mom, revealing that the combo made shooting her latest movie particularly “crazy and wild.”

The Canadian actress stars in the new movie “A Lifelong Love,” premiering July 21, 2023, on Hallmark Movies & Mysteries. And on July 30, she returns as Dr. Faith Carter on the 10th season of “When Calls the Heart,” a role she’s played since 2015.

While filming season 10, Brooks was expecting her second child with her husband, Riley Graydon — a fact her colleagues knew, but that she kept a secret from fans until weeks before their baby boy Levon’s birth on December 17, 2022. Brooks and Graydon also have a three-year-old daughter, Viola, born in November 2019, per Us Weekly. 

In recent interviews, Brooks revealed she now fully understands the pressures parents face to be “ready for everything” and how becoming a mom has not only changed her life, but impacted her view of the roles she plays on Hallmark.

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Andrea Brooks Brought Her ‘Entire Family’ to Film New Hallmark Movie

In “A Lifelong Love,” Brooks plays a woman who is an “extreme Type A,” she recently told TV Fanatic, calling her character a “spunky” writer who’s impeccably organized as she tries to reunite her grandfather with his long lost love. Brooks said she’s been trying to master her own organizational skills now that she’s juggling two kids and a demanding acting career.

“Since becoming a mom, your organizational skills must be intact every moment,” she told TV Fanatic. “Because you never know when you’ll need to have a Band-aid on hand or a snack or water bottle. You have to be ready for everything.”

Becoming a parent, she said, “upends absolutely everything in your life.”

Brooks continued, “I understand the pressure of feeling like you have to deliver at every given moment, and you have to be together and work on your goals. I get that. I really get it.”

After deciding to take time off following Levon’s birth, Brooks unexpectedly got a call from Hallmark about “A Lifelong Love,” which co-stars Patch May, and she just couldn’t say no to it, she told Media Village.

She said, “I’d kind of given myself permission to take a bit of time for myself. It was winter. I wasn’t thinking about projects and was focused on family life. At first, I didn’t know if the time was right, then they mentioned the team behind it, who are all friends and I was like, ‘Oh yes, yes!'”

Brooks told TV Fanatic that in order to make it work with a preschooler and a three-month old , she brought her “entire family,” including her mom.

She recalled, “We were in Winnipeg in the middle of crazy snowstorms. I had my entire family with me because I had a three-month-old baby. So that was crazy and wild. But it was also special cause every night I’d come home, my mom was, looking after my infant, and, so, there was a very wholesome, fun quality to this movie that I’m always going to remember.”

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Andrea Brooks Says Her Hallmark Projects Have Taken On New Meaning

Juggling motherhood and her creative life as an actor has made the time she spends on set and her work with Hallmark more meaningful, she told TV Fanatic.

She said, “I appreciate my time on set a lot more. I appreciate my time getting to work with other creative people a lot more because, you know, life is so chaotic when you have a family.”

“(But) it makes everything better because, at the end of the day, there’s someone waiting for you who needs you,” she continued. “And that’s the mission. That’s why we do what we do. This is why we work — for our family.”

And though Brooks has long been grateful for the work she gets to create with Hallmark, including many rom-com movies over the last decade, she told the outlet it’s taken on new meaning now that she’s a mom.

“Since becoming a mom, my roles, especially in the Hallmark movies, have meant so much more to me,” she said. “There’s something to be said about family values and the entertainment space. My three-year-old can watch one of these movies, and she does; she does watch episodes of ‘When Calls the Heart.’ She watches pieces of the movies that I do, and that we can share that experience is amazing.”

In May 2022, she told Monsters & Critics, “I truly adore family-friendly content. I love the fact that I now have a family (and) that I can watch with my daughter and my grandma. There’s just something so wholesome about it that I value, especially as I’m getting older.”

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